When he wasn't harvesting onions on his 500-acre Fallbrook farm, Thomas Dammann helped plant the seeds for a first-class summer theater in La Jolla. As the original publicist and resident manager of the La Jolla Playhouse in 1947, he helped implement the vision of founding actors Gregory Peck, Mel Ferrer, Dorothy McGuire, Joseph Cotten and Jennifer Jones.

"He was everyone's Man Friday," said his first wife, Harle G. Montgomery. "He wrote programs, interviewed actors and promoted the plays. At the end of the night, he would mingle with the cast at La Valencia Hotel."

The Fallbrook farm and his role at the La Jolla Playhouse were relative footnotes in the life of Mr. Dammann, an adventurous journalist at heart who covered people and events throughout the world for five decades.

"He loved to figure out what made people tick," said Sara Gay Dammann, to whom he had been married since 1967. "He never stopped asking questions, and he cultivated an amazing array of contacts all over the world.

"He became friends with everybody he wrote about."

Mr. Dammann, who had been in declining health for the past three years, died of natural causes Aug. 23 at his home in Charlevoix, Mich. He was 92. In 1946, he bought the Fallbrook property to indulge his love of the soil and to provide a countrylike environment for his young children. In addition to growing onions, he leased part of the land to cattle ranchers, Montgomery said. Peck and Ferrer, whom he had met in Hollywood, recruited him to help with the opening of the La Jolla Playhouse, conceived as a summer showcase of two-week performances. Staged at La Jolla High School, the first season began July 8, 1947, with Dame May Whitty re-creating her original London role in Emlyn Williams' "Night Must Fall."

Mr. Dammann spent about 10 summers at the La Jolla Playhouse. By then, his farm had become a financial burden and he longed to return overseas, where he had served as a correspondent in Europe before World War II.

"He always said farming was a tremendous gamble, and that he probably would have done better by going to Las Vegas," Sara Gay Dammann said. An avid Democrat, he found time while living in the San Diego area to work in the unsuccessful 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns of Adlai Stevenson. In 1956, he was Stevenson's campaign chairman for San Diego County. In 1959, Mr. Dammann and Montgomery, a fellow journalist, went overseas and wrote a series of articles for San Diego Magazine on traveling through Russia. "It was the first summer that Russia allowed foreigners to visit," Montgomery said. "We wrote about everything."

During the 1960s, Mr. Dammann filed stories from throughout Europe and the Middle East. In Geneva, he occupied a 300-year-old farmhouse overlooking an apple orchard.

Working for the Chicago Tribune-New York Times News Syndicate, Mr. Dammann concentrated on feature stories and news analyses, interviewing everybody from heads to state to residents of small villages.

"He enjoyed other cultures," Sara Gay Dammann said. "He could live at the Ritz or in a tent, sit down to dinner with the Shah of Iran or King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, and be happy wandering around with Israeli students the next day." In 1964, Mr. Dammann was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for exposing the Egyptian use of phosgene gas against Yemeni Royalists in a story for Chicago Today. With his second wife, a former La Jollan, he covered the Middle East until returning to Charlevoix, Mich., where his family had owned a summer home since 1917. Before retiring in the mid-1980s, he contributed pieces to newspapers and several national magazines, including Sports Illustrated, Travel and Leisure, Time and Life.

While based in Michigan, he wrote about such issues as the cost of year-round navigation on the Great Lakes and the struggles of American Indians for fishing rights.

Mr. Dammann returned yearly to visit friends and family and attended the 50th anniversary in 1997 of the La Jolla Playhouse, joining Peck, Ferrer and other celebrities.

Before his death, Mr. Dammann had compiled four volumes representing a career that chronicled a half-century of world events. "It's sort of a panorama of 20th-century history," his wife said.

Mr. Dammann, the son of a Chicago lawyer, was born April 10, 1913, in Winnetka, Ill.

He considered a career in law but so enjoyed his stint as business editor of the Harvard Crimson at Harvard University that he became a reporter instead. After graduating from Harvard in 1935, he worked for the City News Bureau of Chicago, followed by the Chicago Daily News, the Nashville Tennessean and the Chicago Times.

In 1938, with war clouds gathering in Europe, he and Montgomery traveled abroad to write a syndicated newspaper column that reflected the voice of the people. They drove through Germany, Italy, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Poland. "We were young and we wanted to get the reactions of young people with war brewing," Montgomery said. "We spoke enough German to get along but didn't get them to say much. They were all caught up with the Hitler theme. All we could write about was what they were doing and thinking."

"When our visas expired, they were not renewed. They (the Nazi regime) didn't like the tone of our articles."

During the war, Mr. Dammann returned to the United States, where he worked for newspapers in Hartford and San Francisco and later the Office of War Information in San Francisco.

"He met several people from Hollywood when he was working in San Francisco," Montgomery said. "They encouraged him to come to Hollywood after the war to work in public relations. He worked for several offices and became acquainted with Peck, Ferrer and McGuire."

Mr. Dammann furthered his Hollywood connections as the movie industry's correspondent for The Times of London.

When told of plans to start a theater in La Jolla, where Montgomery had lived, he enthusiastically accepted an invitation to be a part of it. Survivors include his second wife, Sara Gay Dammann; daughters, Nancy Dammann Davis of Peru and and Tyrrell Edwards of La Jolla; son, F.L. Dammann of Charlevoix, Mich.; sister, Nancy Dammann of Phoenix; brother, J. Francis Dammann of Charlottesville, Va.; a granddaughter; three great-grandchildren. A memorial service was held Sept. 10 in Charlevoix, Mich. Donations are suggested to the Northwest Michigan Community Health/Hospice or Amnesty International.